Nothing has changed

I wrote the following in june last year. Now, when I read it again it feels the same!

"Every morning I go through the headlines of at least five to six newspapers from all over the world. Then I get back to Pakistani newspapers and read two of them in detail. Lately there is no positive news coming out of the country. We are in all sorts of trouble ranging from political upheaval and food crisis to US attacks and rising inflation. Only today I learned that the World Bank has given us the top spot for being the most disturbed country politically in the world; a country where the writ of the government is least visible.

Looking at all of this from the screen of my high-end laptop sitting inside a cold (sometimes too cold) office, living in a country with the highest ecological footprint in the world, makes me feel guilty. It makes me feel as if I’ve left my compatriots to fight the enemy and left the castle from the back door. With each passing day I am finding more and more ground here but at the cost of my lost ground back home. People are coming back from vacations and are advising me not to go right now; they say they went through a lot of difficulties and it’s hard to cope up with all the problems you have to face there. The situation has exacerbated during the last 3 months, the prices have gone up, no one is secure, electricity is just not there and worst of all is that the present government is in no way better than the last one.

But when I think about going back “practically”, I ask myself what would I do there, how would I affect a situation that’s out my control? The answer comes almost immediately from my heart that I don’t want to go back only to change the situation but I also want to suffer with my fellow compatriots, I also want to go though all the difficulties that they are facing so that my conscience doesn’t die, so that I can continue to differentiate between right and wrong with utmost clarity and so that I do not have to look elsewhere each time I face a mirror. I don’t know why it happens that when you find a greener pasture you still miss your barren past."